Uche Nduka

It wouldn't kill me to find new frequencies in a temper tantrum. Tatamis and memory, magnetized selves becoming heavy. Of what is a scream composed? You may want to know. You may want to know why. It is to these arabesques that the birdsong replies. Copula, disappear. Anguish, multifoliate. I am a brother to a wandering prayer. Orb in ruined loop fluting for a lost future. I grab what is left of pistons bouncing across a street. The barricade is foolproof.

when shall your wounds welcome their scabs? daily your kingdom squeaks and leaps to the starlight it wants all of you you of all and the music of the pastures of midnoon a little boy's kaleidoscopticon you are the one the music has chosen and whom strings call twilight moans behind you all you are you are all it is the boy in black talking how civil is the civil war?

boat me around gently. whoever i'm with i'm seeing only you. diplomacy has wounded us. pierced us. smashed us. is there something in the turning of this river's head that will mend our dislocations? your eagle drives my ego. there is ice in your thighs. take the buoys of light for your thighpaths whose eyes night has darkened.

between basalt cliffs no one mourns the loss of statecraft. a blaze over water reminds a quayside that soon the sea shall round up stoneposts, tapers and— should the seafarer invite tenderness to meander through returning hairlines should his fingers become racy or go idling through wingtips of paranoia —the sea shall watch itself riot and reclaim the storm that snaps and screams and whirls past clambacks porcupine quills seeds of clover flesh of tides.